Hi,
After some thought, I've reached the view that most of the simplifications
proposed to txt format are reasonable, from the day that txt is no longer
the archival format. However, I do have two issues.
Some of us still find it handy to print drafts for airplane reading.
It's really too soon to be sure which new format will be the best one
for that. If it's txt, there are a couple of issues with the proposal.
This is not a theoretical statement: I mangled the draft to include
some 85 character lines and no pagination (attached FYI).
1. 85 characters printed in a legible font (10pt) in booklet style
(i.e. A5 pages) are uncomfortably close to the edge of the paper.
Possibly this doesn't matter too much for airplane reading, however.
I did have to change the margins in my printing setup.
2. The lack of pagination turns out to be much more annoying than
I expected. Even in a short draft, I get a couple of widowed
lines of text, and at least in my setup, there's no margin at
the bottom of the page. (The lack of page numbers and running
headers and footers is no loss, IMHO.)
Given that without pagination, there is nothing to stop artwork
being mangled either, I think we need pagination - but we don't
need page numbers; just the form feeds.
On the good news side, rfcdiff works fine with 85 character lines,
and is very happy to have no page breaks to deal with. Such a tool
is essential for document management and review.
Brian
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